Booker Prize 2022: Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka wins with supernatural satire

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, a supernatural satire set amid a murderous Sri Lankan civil war, has won the Booker Prize.

The Sri Lankan writer's novel is about a photographer who wakes up dead, with a week to ask his friends to find his photos and expose the brutality of war.

Camilla, the Queen Consort, presented the prize, and the author said it had been "an honour and a privilege" to be on the shortlist.

Pop singer Dua Lipa was the star guest.

Head judge Neil MacGregor said they admired the book's "daring and hilarity", calling it an "afterlife noir" which "takes the reader on a rollercoaster journey through life and death".

"We think it's a book that will last," he said, adding the judges' decision had been unanimous, and that all of the shortlisted books were "all really about one question, and that is what's the point of an individual life?"

Dua Lipa made a speech talking about her "passion" for reading, calling it "one of the most profound joys in the world".

The singer-songwriter, who was the UK's most-played artist of 2020, said she had read all six shortlisted books, and "absolutely loved it". She also recommends book she loves on social media.

The prestigious £50,000 prize, for a single work of fiction published in the UK in English, also gives the other five writers on the shortlist £2,500 each.

Alan Garner, one of the shortlisted authors, turned 88 on the day of the ceremony, and the audience sang "Happy Birthday" to him, led by Dua Lipa.

Karunatilaka told the Booker website that "despite having a grim history and a troubled present, Sri Lanka is not a dour or depressing place".

"Sri Lankans specialise in gallows humour... laughter is clearly our coping mechanism," he said.

He is the second second Sri Lankan-born author to win the Booker Prize following Michael Ondaatje in 1992.

Karunatilaka decided to write "a ghost story where the dead could offer their perspective" in 2009 after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, "when there was a raging debate over how many civilians died and whose fault it was".

Dua Lipa spoke about the importance of books in her life, telling the BBC's Rebecca Jones that reading "helps me navigate through life and understand emotions and feelings, it's my solace".

She also spoke about how as a child, reading Roald Dahl's The Twits - about a married couple who despise each other - she had realised: "OK, that's a little pearl of wisdom of how you should be, in order to not end up like that."

Enjoying books during her early childhood in Kosovo, had also helped "connect me with my Albanian roots", she added.

by Rebecca Jones, arts correspondent

Where to start with this crazy, exuberant metaphysical whodunnit which is part murder mystery, part comedy?

Imagine combining brownies, trifle and doughnuts into one single cake and you might get the idea.

But Shehan Karunatilaka mixes different genres so deftly that you end up with a rich, satisfying novel, rather than an overstuffed one.

The opening of the book sets the slightly absurd tone. It starts in the afterlife, which turns out to be bureaucratic and banal.

It then flips back and forth between the underworld and the real world during the Sri Lankan civil war in 1990 as Maali Almeida tries to work out who killed him - and why.

Shehan Karunatilaka says the book has been in his head for 10 years and goodness his brain must have been busy.

But he struggled to find an international publisher.

Winning the Booker will bring this dazzling novel, deservedly, to a much wider audience.

The Seven Moons of Maali is Karunatilaka's second novel, having previously won awards including the Commonwealth Book Prize for his debut book Chinaman, which was called the "second best cricket book of all time" by cricketers' almanac Wisden.

Born in 1975, the writer has also worked as an advertising copywriter, and his songs, scripts and stories have been published in Rolling Stone, GQ and National Geographic.

MacGregor, a former director of London's National Gallery and the British Museum, added that the judges read all 170 books put forward for the prize, then whittled them down to 30 and re-read those, before deciding on the final six, which they read for a third time.

When asked by the BBC how many hours he had spent reading novels for the prize, MacGregor said: "I've been doing it almost every week since early December... It's lots and lots of happy reading.

"There's no other way I would ever have come across as many books from different places, different cultures."